Mindhunter

by John Douglas, Mark Olshaker

  We had been told that John Domaille was at Bramshill while we were there. He’s a big-shot cop and the lead investigator on the Ripper cases. He’s told that these two profiling guys from the FBI are here and maybe we should get together. So after class, Bob and I are sitting alone in the academy pub when this guy comes in, is recognized by someone at the bar, and goes over and starts talking to him. We can read his nonverbals and know he’s making fun of the blokes from the U.S. I say to Ressler, "I bet that’s him."

  Sure enough, we’re pointed out to him, he and the other guys come over to our table, and he introduces himself. I say, "I noticed you didn’t bring any files with you."

  He starts making excuses about how complicated a case this is and it would be difficult to bring us up to speed in a short amount of time and such like that.

  "Fine," I reply. "We’ve got plenty of cases of our own. I’d just as soon sit here and drink."

  This take-it-or-leave-it approach gets the Brits interested. One of them asks what we would need to profile a case. I tell him to start by just describing the scenes. He tells me that the UNSUB seems to get the women in a vulnerable position and then blitzes them with a knife or hammer. He mutilates them after death. The voice on the tape was pretty articulate and sophisticated for a prostitute killer. So I say, "Based on the crime scenes you’ve described and this audiotape I heard back in the States, that’s not the Ripper. You’re wasting your time with that."

  I explained that the killer he was looking for would not communicate with the police. He’d be an almost invisible loner in his late twenties or early thirties with a pathological hatred of women, a school dropout, and possibly a truck driver since he seemed to get around quite a bit. His killing of prostitutes was his attempt to punish women in general.

  Despite the fortune of time and resources they’d spent on getting this tape out, Domaille said, "You know, I was worried about that," and later changed the course of his investigation. When thirty-five-year-old truck driver Peter Sutcliffe was arrested on a fluke on January 2, 1981—in the midst of the Atlanta horrors—and was proved to be the Ripper, he bore little resemblance to the one who had made and sent the tape. The impostor turned out to be a retired policeman who had a grudge to settle with Inspector Oldfield.

  After listening to the Georgia tape, I spoke to the Conyers and Atlanta police and, off the top of my head, came up with a scenario I thought would take out this impostor. Like the Ripper’s, this guy’s tone was taunting and superior. "From the tone of his voice and what he’s saying, he thinks you’re all dumb shits," I said, "so let’s use this."

  I advised them to play as dumb as he thought they were. Go to Sigmon Road but search the opposite side of the street; miss him completely. He’ll be watching and maybe you’ll get lucky and grab him right there. If not, he’ll at least call and tell you what idiots you are, that you’re looking in the wrong place. Park Dietz loves this, assimilating this off-the-cuff field stuff into his academic knowledge.

  The police make a very public show of looking for this body, screw up the directions, and sure enough, the guy calls back to tell them how stupid they are. They’re ready with the trap and trace and get this older redneck right in his house. Just to make sure he’s not on the level, they search the right area of Sigmon Road, but of course there’s no body.

  The Conyers incident wasn’t the only red herring in this case. Large investigations often have a fair number of them, and Atlanta was no exception. Close to the road, in the woods near where the earliest skeletonized remains were found, detectives discovered a girlie magazine with semen on some of the pages. The FBI lab was able to lift latent fingerprints and from that get an ID. It’s a white male who drives a van and he’s an exterminator. The psychological symbolism, of course, is perfect. For this type of sociopath, it’s only one small step from exterminating bugs to exterminating black children. We already know that many serial killers return to crime scenes and dump sites. The police speculate that he pulls along the side of the road in his car, looks out over his conquest, and masturbates as he recalls the thrill of the hunt and kill.

  This development works its way up to the director of the FBI, to the attorney general, all the way to the White House. All of them are anxiously waiting to make the announcement that we’ve got the Atlanta child killer. A press release is being prepared. But a couple of things bother me. For one thing, he’s white. For another, he’s happily married. I figure there must be another reason why this guy was there.

  They bring him in for questioning. He denies everything. They show him the magazine with semen stuck to the pages. They tell him they’ve got his prints on it. Okay, he admits, I was driving along and I threw it out of the car. This doesn’t make any sense, either. He’s driving along, one hand on the wheel, the other hand on himself, and he manages to throw this thing out of a car so that it lands in the woods? He’d have to have an arm like Johnny Unitas.

  Realizing this is a serious jam he’s in, he admits that his wife is pregnant, due any day, and he hasn’t had sex in months. Rather than even think of cheating on this woman he loves, who’s about to bear his child, he went down to the 7-Eleven, bought this magazine, then thought he’d go out into these isolated woods on his lunch hour and gain some relief.

  My heart went out to this guy. Nothing is sacred! He figures he’ll go off where he won’t bother anybody, mind his own business, and now even the president of the United States knows he was jacking off in the woods!

  When they caught the impostor in Conyers, I thought that would be that; at least we’d been able to get this racist ass out of the way so the police could concentrate on their investigation. But I hadn’t factored one thing in properly, and that was the active role of the press. Since then, I’ve made sure never to commit that oversight again.

  One thing I had realized was that, at a certain point, the vast media attention the child murders were getting became a satisfaction to the killer in its own right. What I hadn’t counted on was that he would be reacting specifically to media reports.

  What happened was the press was so hungry for any possible break in the case that they heavily covered the police search along Sigmon Road, which came up empty. But soon afterward, another body is found in open view along Sigmon Road in Rockdale County: that of fifteen-year-old Terry Pue.

  To me, this is an incredibly significant development and the beginning of the strategy for how to catch the killer. What it means is, he’s closely following the press and reacting to what they’re reporting. He knows the police aren’t going to find a body on Sigmon Road because he didn’t put one there. But now he’s showing how superior he is, how he can manipulate the press and the police. He’s showing his arrogance and contempt. He can dump a body along Sigmon Road if he wants to! He’s broken his pattern and driven twenty or thirty miles just to play this game. We know he’s watching, so let’s see if we can use that to manipulate his behavior.

  Had I known this or considered the possibility beforehand, I would have thought about staking out the general area along Sigmon Road. But it was too late for that now. We had to look forward and see what we could do.

  I had several ideas. Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. were coming to Atlanta to give a benefit concert at the Omni to raise money for families of the victims. The event was receiving tremendous coverage, and I was absolutely certain the killer would be there. The challenge was, how to pick him out of twenty-odd thousand people?

  Roy Hazelwood and I had profiled a police buff. That could be the key. "Let’s give him a free ticket," I suggested.

  As usual, the police and Atlanta Field Office agents looked at me as if I were crazy. So I explained. We’ll advertise that because so many people are expected, additional security guards will be needed. We’ll offer minimum wage, require that each applicant must have his own vehicle (since we knew our guy had one), and those with some kind of background or experience with law enforcement will be given preference. We have the screening interviews at
the Omni, using hidden closed-circuit television. We’ll eliminate the groups we don’t care about—women, older people, etc.—and concentrate mainly on young black men. Each one will fill out an application, on which we’ll have them list experience such as ambulance driving, whether they’ve ever applied for a police or security job before, all the things that will help us qualify our suspect. We can probably get down to a group of maybe ten or twelve individuals that we can then cross-check against the other evidence.

  This idea went right up the line to the assistant attorney general. The problem is, anytime you have a large organization working on anything that isn’t right out of the book, "analysis paralysis" can set in. By the time my strategy was finally approved, it was the day before the concert and the feeble attempt to recruit "security guards" at that point was too little, too late.

  I had another scheme. I wanted to have wooden crosses made up, about a foot high. Some would be given to families, others would be placed at crime scenes as memorials. One large one could be erected at a church in collective memory of the children. Once this was publicized, I knew the killer would visit some of the sites, particularly the remote ones. He might even try to take one of the crosses. If we had key sites surveilled, I thought we’d have a good chance of nabbing him.

  But it took the Bureau weeks to okay the plan. Then there was a turf war over who got to make the crosses—should it be the FBI exhibit section in Washington, the carpentry shop at Quantico, or should the Atlanta Field Office contract it out? The crosses did eventually get made, but by the time they were usable, events in the case had overtaken us.

  By February, the city was about out of control. Psychics were swarming around, all giving their own "profiles," many dramatically contradicting each other. The press was jumping on any possibility, quoting anyone remotely related to the case who would talk. The next victim to turn up after Terry Pue’s body was found along Sigmon Road was twelve-year-old Patrick Baltazar, off Buford Highway in DeKalb County. Like Terry Pue, he had been strangled. At that time, someone in the medical examiner’s office announced that hair and fibers found on Patrick Baltazar’s body matched those found on five of the previous victims. These were among the ones I had linked together as having the same killer. The announcement of the forensic findings received wide-scale coverage.

  And something clicked with me. He’s going to start dumping bodies in the river. Now he knows they’re getting hair and fiber. One previous body, that of Patrick Rogers, had been found on the Cobb County side of the Chattahoochee River in December, a victim of blunt-force trauma to the head. But Patrick was fifteen, five foot nine, and 145 pounds, a school dropout who had been in trouble with the law. The police were not considering his case related. Whether he was or not, though, I felt the killer would come to the river now, where the water would wash away any trace evidence.

  We’ve got to start surveilling the rivers, I said, particularly the Chattahoochee, the major waterway that forms the northwestern boundary of the city with neighboring Cobb County. But several police jurisdictions were involved, one for each county, as well as the FBI, and no one could take overall charge. By the time a joint surveillance operation composed of FBI and Homicide Task Force personnel was organized and approved, it was already into April.

  But in the meantime, I wasn’t surprised when the next body found—thirteen-year-old Curtis Walker—showed up in the South River. The next two—Timmie Hill, thirteen, and Eddie Duncan, the oldest at twenty-one—appeared within a day of each other in the Chattahoochee. Unlike the previous victims, most of whom had been found fully clothed, these three bodies had been stripped to their underwear, another way of removing hair and fiber.

  Weeks went by with the surveillance teams in place, watching bridges and potential dump sites along the river. But nothing was happening. It was clear the authorities were losing faith and felt as if they were getting nowhere. With no clear progress being made, the operation was scheduled to be shut down at the 6 a.m. shift change on May 22.

  At about 2:30 that very morning, a police academy recruit named Bob Campbell was on his final surveillance shift on the bank of the Chattahoochee beneath the Jackson Parkway Bridge. He saw a car drive across and apparently stop briefly in the middle.

  "I just heard a loud splash!" he reported tensely into his walkie-talkie. He directed his flashlight into the water and saw the ripples. The car turned around and came back across the bridge where a stakeout car followed it and then pulled it over. It was a 1970 Chevy station wagon and the driver was a short, curly-haired, twenty-three-year-old, very light black man named Wayne Bertram Williams. He was cordial and cooperative. He claimed to be a music promoter and said he lived with his parents. Police questioned him and looked into his car before letting him go. But they didn’t lose track of him.

  Two days later, the nude body of twenty-seven-year-old Nathaniel Cater surfaced downstream, not far from where the body of Jimmy Ray Payne, twenty-one, had been found a month earlier. There wasn’t enough evidence to arrest Williams and get a search warrant, but he was put under "bumper lock" surveillance.

  He soon became aware of the police following him and led them on wild-goose chases throughout the city. He even drove to Safety Commissioner Lee Brown’s home and started honking his horn. He had a darkroom in his house, and before a warrant could be obtained, he was observed burning photographs in his backyard. He also washed out the car.

  Wayne Williams fit our profile in every key respect, including his ownership of a German shepherd. He was a police buff who had been arrested some years earlier for impersonating a law officer. After that, he had driven a surplus police vehicle and used police scanners to get to crime scenes to take pictures. In retrospect, several witnesses recalled seeing him along Sigmon Road when the police were reacting to the phone tip and searching for the nonexistent body. He had been taking photographs there, which he offered to the police. We also found out that he had, indeed, attended the benefit concert at the Omni.

  Without arresting him, the FBI asked him to come to the office, where he was cooperative and didn’t ask for an attorney. From reports I received, I didn’t feel that the interrogation had been properly planned or organized. It had been too heavy-handed and direct. And I thought he was reachable at that point. After the interview, I was told he hung around the office and acted as if he still wanted to talk about police and FBI stuff. But when he left that day, I knew they would never get a confession out of him. He agreed to a polygraph, which proved inconclusive. Later, when police and FBI agents got a warrant and searched the house he shared with his retired-schoolteacher parents, they found books that showed how to beat a lie detector.

  That warrant was obtained on June 3. Despite Williams’s having washed out the car, police found hair and fiber linking him with about twelve of the murders, the exact ones I had profiled as being done by the same killer.

  The evidence was compelling. Not only did they get fibers linking the bodies to Williams’s room and house and car, Larry Peterson of the Georgia State Crime Lab matched fibers from clothing some of the victims had worn on occasions prior to their disappearance. In other words, there was a connection to Williams before some of the murders.

  On June 21, Wayne B. Williams was arrested for the murder of Nathaniel Cater. The investigation into the other deaths continued. Bob Ressler and I were at the Hampton Inn, near Newport News, Virginia, speaking before a meeting of the Southern States Correctional Association, when the arrest was announced. I was just back from England and the Yorkshire Ripper case, and I was talking about my work on serial murder. Back in March, People magazine had run a story about Ressler and me and that we were tracking the Atlanta killer. In the article, which headquarters had directed us to cooperate with, I’d given elements of the profile, particularly our opinion that the UNSUB was black. The story had gotten a lot of attention nationally. So when I took questions from this audience of more than five hundred people, someone asked my opinion of the Williams arrest. />
  I gave some of the background on the case and our involvement with it and how we had come up with the profile. I said he fit the profile and added carefully that if it did turn out to be him, I thought he "looked pretty good for a good percentage of the killings."

  I didn’t know the questioner was a reporter, though I’m sure I would have answered the same even if I had. The next day I was quoted in the Newport News-Hampton Daily Press as saying, "He looks pretty good for a good percentage of the killings," leaving out my critically important qualifying statement before that.

  The story hit the news wire, and the next day I was being quoted all over the country, on all the network news programs, in all the major newspapers, including a story in the Atlanta Constitution with the headline "FBI Man: Williams May Have Slain Many."

  I was getting calls from everywhere. There were television cameras in the hotel lobby and in the hallway outside my room. Ressler and I had to climb down the fire escape to get out.

  Back at headquarters, the shit was hitting the fan. It looked like an FBI agent intimately involved with the case had declared Wayne Williams guilty without a trial. Driving back to Quantico, I tried to explain to Unit Chief Larry Monroe on the mobile telephone what had really happened. He and the assistant director, Jim McKenzie, tried to help me out and run interference with OPR, the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility.

  I remember I was sitting in the upper floor of the library at Quantico where I used to go to write my profiles in peace and quiet. It also had the advantage of windows to look out of, unlike our subterranean offices. Monroe and McKenzie came up to talk to me. They were both big supporters of mine. I was the only one doing profiling full-time, I was completely burnt out from running all over the place, Atlanta had been a huge emotional drain, and the thanks I got for all of it was the threat of a censure for this statement that was picked up out of context by the media.